Philosopher's Zone is back and other philosophy news

'School of Athens' by Raphael. Epicurus is on our left.

After Alan Saunders' death, the Australian radio show about philosophy, Philosopher's Zone, was on a hiatus. It is back, now hosted by Joe Gelonesi. In  the first new broadcast, Professor Bonnie Honig discusses democracy and public space.

On Melvyn Bragg's BBC show, In Our Time, Bragg discusses Epicurus with Angie Hobbs, David Sedley, and James Warren.

At the Guardian, Peter Thompson of the University of Sheffield has a five-part series on the Frankfurt School. Here they are: one, two, three, four and five.

On YouTube, the presentations from the 2012 Sellars Centenary Conference.

A 'journeyman Barthio-Lutheran theologian' tries his hand at translating the first part of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

On seeing Beckett in terms of analytic philosophy and 'Beckett the Nietzschean hedonist'.

Several posts on Kierkegaard by Barry Stocker.

From Truth Tableaux, 'On Fernando Pessoa’s Philosophical Essays'

On MOOCs, and more. On a 'we've-been-here-before' note, there's this.

Advice sought concerning what logic textbooks to use for a course on symbolic logic.

Help sought in listing novels about philosophers philosophical theories.

I love this couple's YouTube clips. They're from a 60's German TV show, in which Cherry Wainer and Don Storer played during the intermissions. In some clips you can see Cherry working the Hammond organ peddles with her white go-go boots. In others you can see German existentialist dancing. In most clips, you catch a glimpse of the lethargic little dog that sat next to Cherry. One of my favourite clips is this one, but I've opted to include this next clip chiefly because it shows Don in some of his best spontaneous vocal and facial expressions. (Update, Aug. 2, 2013): Dammit! Most of their videos have been pulled. This is the only one still on YouTube.
 

Tolstoy and a two-part documentary on Chechnya (2005)

Liesl Schillinger turns to Tolstoy's Hadji Murat, his final novel, which was about a Chechen warlord. Here's Nicholas Lezard's 2003 review of Hugh Aplin's translation. Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear recently completed their own translation of Hadji Murat.

The first clip (below) was posted by Juan Cole. I dug around and found the second part. At 7:54 of the second clip Tom de Waal, an English journalist, is interviewed. He appears several times in that clip. It turns out that Thomas de Waal is a brother of Edmund de Waal, who wrote The Hare with Amber Eyes. A third de Waal brother, Alex, writes on African history.
 

 

Fiddling with the whatchamacallits

There's been much fiddling of late with the thing-a-ma-jigs and doo-hickeys in the right margin. I added a blog feed for history and a new link list for on-line philosophy texts. I'm sure there are many more sites with on-line texts out there -- please let me know of any good sites that I've missed.

In a fit of Canucky patriotism, I added a link list for informative sites about Canada, esp. for Canadian literature. In that connection, I was shocked to learn from the Canadian poetry site at the University of Toronto that Canadian poetry is over -- done, kaput. To quote the site, 'Until further notice, Canadian Poetry is not accepting new poets.' Yes, the great tradition of Sir Charles 'God Damn' is now closed -- and with nary a word of protest in the House of Commons.